Friday, July 22, 2011

Blog # 168 One Creator of All

Blog # 168 One Creator of All
To believe in a single creator of all that exists is to believe everything and everyone has its/their origin and destiny, purpose and fulfillment in God. Knowledge of the anatomy and life of a single honey bee would be enough for me to marvel at the wisdom and power of its creator. That awesome wisdom and power is shared in some mysterious way with all who believe in a single Creator of all. In the light of my strong conviction in the truth of this insight I have no problem welcoming advances in science technology and human development. I see
the tremendous advances we have experienced just in my own short lifetime not as threats to my love for God but as ground and reason for deepening that love.
Yet my faith and my love for God remains a choice on my part. The answer to the question Is God real? is Yes or No. The question is more important and God deserves more than the answer Maybe.
Can I prove God is real? No, thanks be to God. To prove God is real would in a real sense require us to be greater than God. God would necessarily have to be identified. measured and contained in our limited human capacities and consequently under our control, identifying us as God's God.
Can or need we prove that red is red, or five pounds is five pounds? It would be something like that to try to prove that God exists. The big question is not whether God exists, but whether or not God is benign and gracious, whether God is our Friend and our Father.
To prove that God exists is one thing. To discover God is another. That we can do.. God has revealed Himself in creation, the Bible, especially in Jesus, in history, and through our own individual unique conscience. Someone has said: "I know God exists because I pray." You need not prove someone is with you when you are talking to him. It is something like this with God and God's relationship with those who pray.
Once we arrive at the idea of God's 'footprints', as it were, in nature (Wisdom 13, Romans 1: 19) then it helps to investigate the nature of things around us. We know something of a person by what that person does. We know something of God through our knowledge of creation.
Beginning here in Blog # 168 and continuing tomorrow I will share with you quotations from a small pamphlet a science prof gave our class back in third year high school in 1943. It is an invitation for us to remind ourselves and respond again to the claims we make for God when we say we believe in God as the single creator of all that exists.
Perhaps it is because we find too little in our personal world that is marvelous wonderful mysterious and loving that we do not relate these terms in a significant personal way to God. The words of Jesus: knock, seek, ask, seem very important here.
What do you know about the sun? The sun has been throwing out 4,000,000 tons of light energy a second for millions of years. (There are 86,400 seconds in a single day.) The sun's surface is 10,000 degrees. Its interior is about 30,000,000 degrees. If we had to pay some power Company for the light received by the earth daily from the sun the bill would make the national debt look like the price of a hot dog at the beach. Yet the earth receives only one billionth part of all the sun's power. And it all belongs to God our Creator !